exhibition

Its largest public exhibition ever to feature original material from the set

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The collection has 352 famous works and commentaries, visible until December 31

The musician and visual artist’s show includes a music installation in the Catalan capital's airport

Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Alexander Calder and Julio González are the protagonists of ‘Art revolutionaries’, a major exhibition which opened in London this Wednesday and will reproduce the Pavilion of the Spanish Republic from the 1937 Paris International Exposition. Catalan gallery Mayoral is the name responsible for the initiative, which aims to pay tribute “to those artists which were committed to democracy and freedom in the middle of Spanish Civil War”, Mayoral’s director, Jordi Mayoral, told the CNA. The Republican Pavilion displayed works by these artists and became a strategic platform to vindicate the tragic situation the country was going through. The exhibition includes archival documents to contextualise the artworks and “immerse the visitor in the Republican atmosphere”, added Mayoral.

Barcelona’s Picasso Museum will add 1,150 m² for exhibitions this 2017. This new area will be located on the second floor of the ‘Palau de les Finestres’, one of the five buildings composing the museum, which has been undergoing refurbishment. The Picasso Museum currently occupies five large town houses on Montcada street, in Barcelona’s old town, dating from between the 13^th and the 15^th century. During the presentation of the museum’s programme for this year, the Picasso Museum’s new director, Emmanuel Guigon, also announced that this year’s major exhibition will be ‘Picasso Portraits’, co-produced with London’s National Portrait Gallery, which will be displayed from March until June. There will also be three smaller exhibitions this 2017, some of them to be hosted in the restored area at the ‘Palau de les Finestres’.

Picasso’s attraction to Romanesque art is to be definitively unveiled in an exhibition dedicated to him at the National Art Museum of Catalonia (MNAC). The display will open its doors next Thursday and is co-organised with the Musée National Picasso-Paris. The exhibition includes forty works by the artist lent by the French museum, which are being added to the collection of Romanesque art from the MNAC. According to one of the exhibition’s curators, Emilia Philippot, the display demonstrates the “echoes of simplicity and primitivism” of Romanesque art in certain Picasso creations. Picasso, like other artists of his time, was attracted by the Romanesque, identified with the “childhood of art”. His interest is proved in the exhibition with various unpublished documents, such as correspondence and books belonging to the artist.

Autonomous vehicles or a device capable of detecting free parking spaces, intelligent lights that monitor traffic, headphones designed to facilitate the mobility of blind people in cities and charging spaces for mobile phones that take advantage of the structure of the old telephone booths. These are some of the technological innovations that visitors can see at the sixth edition of the Smart City Expo World Congress (SCEWC), taking place between this Tuesday and next Thursday. The event is the showcase of smart cities and this year celebrates its largest edition yet, with 600 cities participating, 576 exhibitors, 412 speakers and a forecast for 14,000 visitors. Along with this event, the Gran Via Exhibition Centre is hosting three more: the Circular Economy Summit, iWater and European Utility Week, which turns Barcelona into the world capital of sustainable development.

From this Friday the 29^th of October to the 5^th of February 2017, the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia, is holding the exhibition ‘Surrealism in Catalonia. The artists of Empordà and Salvador Dalí’. The exhibition presents 70 works by 29 different Catalan artists from private collections or loaned by museums such as the Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, Cau Ferrat in Sitges, De l’Empordà, in Figueres and Art in Cadaqués, one of the Costa Brava’s most iconic villages. The goal of the exhibition is to mark the importance of the surrealist art movement in Catalonia, mainly cultivated in Empordà – northern Catalonia - in the history of European Surrealism. Amongst the 70 pieces displayed in the exhibition there are paintings, but also works of sculpture and graphic art, such as the masterpiece by Dalí ‘Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening’.

Barcelona’s City Hall had to dismantle the exhibition ‘Franco-Victory-Republic: impunity and urban space’after the equestrian sculpture of dictator Francisco Franco was pulled down last night. The monument, the head of which was pulled off in an act of vandalism a couple of years ago, had suffered several attacks since it was put in place before the ‘El Born’cultural centre on Monday. It was vandalised with graffiti, many offended citizens threw eggs and fruits at it and even objects such as the head of a pig were spontaneously added to the monument. According to Barcelona’s Deputy Mayor, Gerardo Pisarello, the exhibition “was a good decision” rather than a mistake because “it has generated public debate and reflection on the Francoism impunity”. The exhibition also included another Francoist sculpture, ‘Victoria’, which was withdrawn this Friday by Barcelona’s City Hall, because it didn’t make “any sense without the sculpture of the dictator”, Pisarello explained.

The pieces are an equestrian sculpture of Franco, the head of which was pulled off in an act of vandalism a couple of years ago, and ‘Victoria’, by sculptor Frederic Marés. After many years of being kept in a Barcelona City Hall warehouse the Francoist sculptures were erected this Monday on the esplanade before the ‘El Born’ Cultural Centre, in Barcelona’s historic centre, amid criticism from citizens and political parties. Indeed, several people booed the workers while they erected the sculptures this morning and threw eggs at them. According to Barcelona’s deputy mayor, Gerardo Pisarello, the exhibition ‘Franco-Victory-Republic: impunity and urban space’ aims to “force society to think about what Franco’s dictatorship represented” and the “impunity” this period has had “during Spain’s democracy”. 

24 photographs from Miquel Ruiz, a Catalan photographer, are being displayed at an exhibition in Sarajevo, which kicked off on Thursday. The picture of the Library of Sarajevo destroyed by Serb artillery during the siege of the Bosnian capital is one of the masterpieces of the exposition ‘We don’t forget’, which takes place precisely in the same monumental building which appears in ruins in the image and which was restored in 2014. The Catalan Minister of Foreign Affairs, Raül Romeva, stated during his visit to the exhibition that it recalls that “Catalonia has always been with Sarajevo and Bosnia, even when the EU turned its back on them”. Romeva added that the images call us “to persevere in the construction of peace".

The possibility that two Francoist sculptures may be displayed in Barcelona’s city centre as part of a temporary exhibition has unleashed controversy in the Catalan capital. ‘Franco-Victory-Republic: impunity and urban space’ aims to “force society to think about what Franco’s dictatorship represented” and the “impunity” this period has had “during Spain’s democracy”, explained Barcelona’s deputy mayor, Gerardo Pisarello. However, taking the exhibition to the streets by displaying the Francoist sculpture ‘Victoria’, and an equestrian sculpture of Franco himself, hasn’t gone down well with some political forces and associations in Catalonia. “In this country the executioners were not judged and the victims were not properly buried” stated ERC’s President in Barcelona’s City Hall, Alfred Bosch, adding that he considers the wounds that Franco’s dictatorship provoked not yet healed. 

The exhibition can be visited from the 26th of May until the 4th of September. It displays artworks created by Picasso between the 24th of October 1968 and the 25th of March 1972, and first shown in Paris only a year after their completion in 1973, when the artist was still alive. “The last Picasso, the engraver”, is shown in this exhibition, one who “experimented freely” and had an “overflowing life force”, according to a statement released by the museum. The artist created these works at his home in France, and in them, he focuses on the same subjects he always used, such as the painter and the model, and focuses especially on the female nude. Picasso also pays homage to several other artists in the series, including Goya, Manet, Raphael, Rembrandt, Velázquez, and especially Degas. The Museum calls the collection a “final tragicomedy, rich and complex”.

The ‘Bruce Davidson’ exhibition, the very first retrospective dedicated to the American photographer to be held in Spain is to open at the non-profit institution Fundación MAPFRE in Barcelona. The exhibition will run from the 28th of May until the 28th of August, after which it will embark on an international tour. Photographer Bruce Davidson has more than fifty years of uninterrupted work behind him (as well as membership of the prestigious photography co-op, Magnum), which are featured in chronological order in the exhibition. Along with Davidson’s most important photographs and series, the artist’s never-before-featured new works will also be on display. In the exhibition “we can see the stylistic evolution of his work but can also see a small condensed history of American photography from the second half of the twentieth century, which is, undoubtedly, a universal reference for photography”, explained the curator of the exhibition, Carlos Gollonet.